About Me

Kristin Bricker is a freelance journalist and translator. She specializes in militarization, social movements, and the drug war in Latin America.

Kristin is a contributor to the CIP Americas Program. She previously served as the Security Sector Reform Resource Centre's Latin America blogger. Her work has appeared in NACLA, the Huffington Post, IPS, Foreign Policy in Focus, Counterpunch, Telesur, Rebelión, Left Turn, The Indypendent, Upside Down World, Por Esto!, The Guatemala Times, and The News (Mexico). Kristin has appeared on Al-Jazeera, Democracy Now!, Radio Mundo (Venezuela), Morning Report (New Zealand), Radio Bemba (Mexico) and various Pacifica radio programs. Her work has been cited in the Los Angeles Times, Proceso, and the Congressional Research Service's Report for Congress.

Kristin contributed a chapter about Mexico's peace movement to Global Fire, Local Sparks, published by the Indypendent.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

To: The compañeros adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle all over the world.

From: The Zapatistas from Chiapas, Mexico.

Compañeras, compañeros, and compañeroas:

Compas in the Network Against Repression and for Solidarity:

Everyone, greetings from the women, men, children, and elders of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, the smallest of your compañeros.

We've decided that our first word specially directed at our compañeros [who are adherents to] the Sixth should be made known in a space of struggle, such as the Network Against Repression and for Solidarity. But the words, feelings, and thoughts that are sketched here are also meant for those who are not here. And, above all, they're for them.

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We would like to thank the support that you have given to our communities, to our Zapatista support bases and to the prisoners who are adherent compass in Chiapas, throughout all this time.

Your words of encouragement and your collective hand that connected with ours are guarded in our heart.

We are sure that one of the points to be discussed in your meeting will be, or has already been, setting up a campaign to support the compa Kuy, to denounce the attack that he was subjected to, and to demand justice for him and for all of the others who were injured on that day, to demand unconditional freedom for all of the detained in Mexico City and Guadalajara during the protests against the imposition of Enrique Peña Nieto as head of the federal executive branch.

Not just that, but it is also important that this campaign contemplate fundraising to support compa Kuy with his hospital bills, and for the costs of his subsequent recuperation, which the Zapatistas hope will be soon.

To support this fundraising campaign, we've sent a small amount of cash. We ask you, even though it might be small, to add the money you're able to get together for our compañero in the struggle. As soon as we can put together more money, we will send it to whomever you [the Network Against Repression] designate for this work.

The Sixth is a Zapatista convocation. To convoke is not to unite. We aren't trying to unite under a leadership, neither Zapatista nor any other affiliation. We do not seek to co-opt, recruit, take anyone's place, feign, fake, cheat, direct, subordinate, use. The destination is the same, but the different, the heterogeneity, the autonomy of the ways of walking, are the Sixth's richness, they're it's strength. We offer and will offer respect, and we demand and will demand respect. One adheres to the Sixth without any other requisite other than the "no" that convokes us and the commitment to construct the necessary "yeses."

To end this missive (which, as is evident, has the disadvantage of not having a video or song that accompanies it and completes the written version), we want to send our best hugs (and we only have one) to the men, women, children, and elderly, groups organizations, movements, who however each one of you calls yourselves, who have never during all this time distanced us from your hearts, and resisted and supported as compañeras, compañeras, and compañeroas that we are.

Compas:

We are the Sixth.

It's going to be very difficult.

Our pains won't be lessened by opening ourselves up to those that hurt all over the world. The path will be the most torturous.

We will fight.

We will resist.

We will struggle.

Maybe we'll die.

But one, ten, one hundred times, we'll always win always.

For the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee-General Command of the

Zapatista National Liberation Army

The Sixth-EZLN.

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos.

Chiapas, Mexico, Planet Earth.

January 2013.

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Listen and watch the videos that accompany this text:

"Zapatista Cumbia" by the group "Sonido Psicotropical." Part of the disc "Rola la lucha zapatista." Move your tush to the cumbia rhythm!